Comment I'm an astronomer who studied supernovae ... (Score 4, Interesting) 30
... and can say that the question, "how does the luminosity of type Ia supernovae depend on redshift?" is a very, very complex one. The number of factors which come into play is large (metallicity, age of the binary system, extinction in the local environment, extinction in the intergalactic environment, corrections for photometric calibration as a function of redshift, etc.), and it's easy to fall into the trap of finding one correlation that seems to explain everything.
I'll add that it's particularly easy, in my opinion, for theorists to fall into this trap.
Comment Re:Cool (Score 1) 41
> The US did not even had to mine the uranium for the bomb. They got it from Germany in April 1945,
Please stop posting misinformation.
Comment Kepler did put the Sun at the focus of ellipse (Score 2) 59
Take a look at one of the illustrations from "Astronomia Nova", which shows the orbit of a planet.
https://i.sstatic.net/8322a.jp...
Disclaimer: I'm an astronomer.
Comment Set of observations by people in Europe (Score 3, Informative) 33
The following webpage contains a set of light curves and videos from astronomers in Europe who succeeded in measuring the brief dimming of Betelgeuse last night:
Comment Re:Hardly the only one. (Score 1) 160
> I would bet money that I am the only person present
> who ever got paid for programming in APL.
I'll take that bet. I made a bit of spending money in college by acting as a computer labbie in a room full of IBM 3270 terminals running APL. I wouldn't call my past self an expert, but I could help the occasional student working on a course assignment.
Comment "Jupiter and Venus" should be "Jupiter and Saturn" (Score 1) 43
Whoever wrote the summary should be fired.
Comment This is theoretical simulation, not observations (Score 4, Informative) 44
For those who did not read the paper: the paper starts with a model of the stellar population of the Milky Way, and a model for stellar evolution, and predicts the positions of stellar remnants (black holes and neutron stars). It is not a catalog of actual black holes and neutron stars observed by astronomers.
Comment Re:Many in France will be outraged (Score 2) 123
Actually, this joke was first made by a BRITISH (well, sort of) astronomy at Maynooth University in Ireland. He posted it, and then the French astronomer stole the joke and re-posted it the next day without attribution.
See
Comment Link to the technical article (open access) (Score 3, Informative) 18
For those who want to read the original paper, go to
Comment Re:Semi serious question (Score 1) 67
Correction: any Earth-sized planet in another stellar system will most certainly NOT subtend "several pixels"; instead, any such planets will be point sources. In brief, diameter of Earth is around 10^7 m, while the nearest star is of order 10^(16) m away from us. The angular size of the Earth at such a distance would thus be 10^(-9) radians, which corresponds to 0.0002 arcseconds.
In comparison, the diffraction limit of JWST at a wavelength of 2 microns is roughly (2 x 10^(-6) m)/ (6.5 m) = 3 x 10^(-7) radians. That's more an an order of magnitude larger than the angular size of the Earth at the distance to the nearest star; for the great majority of stars -- which are much more distant -- the difference is even larger.
tl;dr JWST will measure Earth-like exoplanets as point sources.
Comment Re:Collective bargaining (Score 5, Interesting) 107
Comment Link to the full paper, free access at arXiv (Score 3, Informative) 80
Comment Re:Replace it (Score 1) 111
The Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) on JWST has a channel which can take images at wavelengths as short as 600 nm = 0.6 microns. That's within the range of human vision, contrary to your statement.
Moreover, since JWST has an aperture roughly 2.5 times as large as that of HST, the images it takes at 600 nm will be sharper than those taken by HST. It's true that the plate scale NIRCam will prevent it from fully sampling this higher resolution, but the images taken by JWST at this wavelength will certainly rival those of HST, and perhaps exceed them in some cases.
Comment Re:"A" in "Awk" is for "Aho" (Score 2) 48
In part, as described by the other commenter, because the number of characters needed to type to carry out a simple task is often smaller for awk than for perl. But mostly because I started using awk before Perl existed